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Biomutant is an imaginative, single-player action-RPG set against a post-post-apocalypse where tiny mammals have become martial arts masters. Think TMNT, but instead of turtles Splinter found a ferret, a guinea pig, someone’s cat, and Gizmo from Gremlins. These weird-looking mutant animals have inherited an Earth in danger of ending all over again – but not before they learnt to walk upright and build guns.
However, while Biomutant is buoyed by some fantastic enemy creature designs and boasts a deep well of combat options and customisable weapons, these successes are married to some fairly basic and repetitive objectives, quests, and puzzles, as well as a story that seems to regularly overstate its own substance.
If you’re thinking that trekking around a vibrant and varied open world filled with strange creatures and primitive civilisations trying to stave off a second Armageddon sounds a little similar to Sony’s esteemed Horizon: Zero Dawn, you’re on the right track; Horizon: Zero Dawn with rodents isn’t exactly the worst description for Biomutant. Hell, it even features a robot horse. Horizon is far from the only influence on Biomutant, though, because it appears to scrape inspiration from a wide assortment of sources, from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s extreme temperature zones to the seemingly infinite array of weapon combinations of Borderlands, and from Devil May Cry’s cocktail of gun combat and hack ’n slash to… Kung Fu Panda. That last one is probably fairly self-explanatory.
To its credit, the way Biomutant fuses all its components together has resulted in something that is actually unique, at least broadly speaking. It’s certainly the only open-world post-post-apocalyptic kung fu action RPG starring anthropomorphic animals I’ve ever played. The key disappointment is that the structure of the actual game that all these ingredients have been injected into is anything but unique, with objectives and tasks overtly recycled or riffed upon mission after mission.
When Six Tribes Go to War
The first several hours are probably the worst offenders, even though it’s engaging at first. The clever character creation system is a bit like a genetic dartboard, automatically adjusting your hero’s appearance depending on what core stats you want to bolster before diving in. Additionally, there are a bunch of available character classes that will define your avatar’s initial appearance. As a meathead with an aversion to magic I opted for a Commando build for a focus on firepower and ended up with a character that looked a bit like Sylvester Stallone’s cat after an exclusive diet of plutonium-laced Fancy Feast and Rambo movies – but if you want some kind of pink, warlock mouse, Biomutant has your back.
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After it walked me through its linear intro and deposited me into the open world, Biomutant seems to spin its wheels a bit. Choosing a tribe to ally with locks you into certain goals: uniting or conquering the tribes, and either saving the Tree of Life or letting it die. Either way, the enemy base conquest mission thread quickly unfurls to reveal that it’s largely just a series of repeated sequences and recycled vignettes. There’s no real flexibility when it comes to conquering outposts – and invisible walls will stop you if you try to come at it from another angle. You can only tackle them via a rigid series of encounters repeated from tribe to tribe and base to base whether you’re trying to unite the tribes or conquer them. I’ve worked for a peaceful tribe whose leader warned me against causing collateral damage and, in New Game +, an evil tribe who demanded mayhem, and the process involves lighting exactly the same amount of hay on fire.
An even bigger letdown came later, as I began to tackle Biomutant’s four key ‘Worldeater’ bosses. The boss fights are identical whether you’re trying to stop them eating the Tree of Life or you’re trying to let them eat it; they just come back to life and keep on munching, making the whole encounter pointless. Preparation for each boss tends to follow a consistent formula: gather a bunch of parts for a vehicle and catch five tiny creatures that you’ll later be able to launch at these bosses as distractions. A lot of Biomutant is just collecting stuff, and collecting stuff just… isn’t that interesting after a while.
Bio Dome
It’s a shame the missions and objectives feel stale so quickly because the world itself is very impressive. There’s a great sense of grand scale, particularly with things like the enormous Tree of Life and landmarks like collapsing bridges and a decaying dam. It’s extremely varied, too, from thick forest to scorching desert, and fluorescent radioactive zones to barren wastelands.
They’re filled with enemies with truly fantastic character designs, and there are so many different types of rival creatures and crazy mutant animals to battle – large and small. My first run through Biomutant took just over 20 hours, and yet even by the end of that I was still encountering enemies I’d never seen before, from killer plants to giant furry monsters wearing pyjamas. They’re not always particularly smart and can be prone to getting hung up on obstacles, trapped on ledges, or stuck in rooms, but the range of enemy types is terrific.
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There’s also an impressive range of choices for fighting them. Biomutant supports a vast pile of different combat options, so many that it feels unlikely two friends would find themselves taking identical approaches. For most of my playthrough I went with a strict focus on a mighty two-handed melee weapon, a heavily-upgraded automatic rifle, and a couple of powers I’d found useful, including levitation, a ground pound that spews out toxic waste, and a supernatural rapid-dash move. I’m sure you’ll gravitate towards entirely different perks, considering you have everything from ice powers to bouncy mutant mushrooms to choose from. I don’t know if I can say all the powers are different enough to profoundly shift up the moment-to-moment combat but having the agency to pick perks that, for instance, got me off the ground and out of danger when necessary definitely suited my playstyle.
Button mashing is sufficient to a point but to execute cool combos and juggles a little more finesse is required. I did find it extremely frustrating, however, whenever I’d backtrack over an invisible line during a combat encounter and the enemy I was fighting would break off their attack and have their health reset to full, regardless of how low it was. It’s something that only happened a handful of times but it was a baffling problem to have.
Ring Ding Dong
Everything about Biomutant is a bit weird, so it should come as no surprise that its story is very strangely delivered. Beyond what appears to be the good and evil halves of your character’s conscience, which irregularly pop up for some idle banter amongst themselves, all of the dialogue is delivered by a single narrator who explains the world and translates NPC dialogue. It’s initially kind of quaint, though I found it a bit wearisome over time.
It’s not so much the narrator’s random interjections; it’s more that his regular attempts at profundity write a lot of cheques that a game that’s really just about hamsters bashing the crap out of each other with toilet brushes struggles to cash. Biomutant seems to have a lot it wants to say about the past, the future – and possibly forgiveness – but its fortune cookie wisdom feels a fraction too earnest.
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The writing itself also swings drastically between overly verbose to gratingly child-like, and eventually I began to find it a bit much. One minute the narrator is waxing philosophical about the ever-branching and beautiful ramifications of the Tree of Life, and the next he’s telling me all about porky puffs and pong paddles and pling plong booths. I suspect a lot of folks may probably have more stamina for this that me – and you can dial it back to dialogue and mission critical notes only – but either way I think it leans a little too hard into its toddler neologisms and the result sounds a bit like someone forced Sir David Attenborough to narrate In The Night Garden, the BBC’s bafflingly impenetrable, Teletubbies-on-acid kids show that only makes sense to preschoolers and Teletubbies fans who do acid.